Design 2—500 WORDS REPORT

by sauly0515

In this semester, we mainly studied smart city. Through this semester’s study, I believed that smart city is not a pure concept of technique. Just like “garden city”, “ecological city” and “scenic city”, smart city is a description of the direction of urban development, and a concrete reflection of information technology and network technology that’s penetrated through all the aspects of urban life. (Obeng-Odoom, 2009) “Smart city” refers to a huge revolution of urban management and operating system. It broadens new horizons for the new urban development, and offers brand-new regulating means of urban planning, construction and management. (Townsend, n.d.)Thus, it provides urban regulation and management with powerful tools. In addition, “smart city” will better reflect the “interactive” function of modern cities. With the changes of life brought by the accelerated information development, the research of “smart city” is quite necessary. At the beginning of this semester, my main research topic is “speeding fine”, which is a part of smart city. In the first place, I was quite worried about this topic, because I know little about automobiles. I even don’t know anything about speeding fine. Hence, this topic is a huge challenge to me. That’s also why I have many unique inspirations from the beginning to the final formation of viewpoints.

Let’s start from the original research. Through the design of ZIN, I went to the main streets to look for signs of speeding camera. I also held some preliminary ideas to explore this theme. I had many ideas in my mind and I drew some of the future speeding fines. Although the idea was quite naïve in the first place, it still served as the most important part in the research and helped me a lot in the final design idea. (Figure 1)

Figure 1

In the further design, I hoped to alleviate speeding by figuring out a method of controlling the speed of automobiles. So I combined the topic “garbage collection” in “smart city”, and built a new “garbage brick” system. By virtue of the motive power generated by the new deceleration strip I designed, automobiles can drive the fans inside the trash cans by the roadside to smash and compress garbage. Thus, the pressure from garbage can be alleviated. The deceleration strip can effectively control speeding and provide motive power for smart city. Hence, it is an extremely environmental friendly design idea. (Figure 1. Figure 2)

After the exhibition, I received some new advice. The teacher thought my idea might not be able to be realized in the next five to ten years. I was quite confused. Also, I kept updating my idea. In the continuous exploration, I re-organized my train of thought and initiated brainstorming, hoping to find a way out. I even studied the internal structure of automobiles, hoping to change certain components to control speeding. In the end, through the continuous communication with the supervisor and other classmates, I was finally inspired. Perhaps out of the aspiration to control speeding, or the thought of turning simple fines and score deduction into the fear towards speeding, I finally had an idea. If those who were speeding could be taken to the police for photo-shooting, their ugliest photos would be taken and presented in public, such as newspaper, magazine, advertising board and social media. In this way, speeding drivers would feel ashamed and avoid violating the rule the next time. This can indeed effectively control speeding, and turn “speeding fine” into punishments that are different from the traditional sense. (Figure 4)

Figure 4

In the end, I’d like to extend my gratitude to my supervisor and friends who have offered me advice and assistance. Thank you very much.